The RAND corporation recently released a white paper that examines issues of patient privacy, consent, and identity management in the Military Health System (MHS), prepared with the aim of increasing interoperability between military and non-military health providers.

To help healthcare organizations and HIM professionals navigate their way through new legislative components and industry practices, AHIMA’s “Release of Information Toolkit: A Practical Guide for the Access, Use, and Disclosure of Protected Health Information,” has been revised to incorporate various types of disclosures of protected health information and to reflect today’s practices.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released data on hospital outpatient charges. CMS hopes the data release will help researchers to better understand Medicare spending and service use, which they hope will in turn lead to more innovation.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is set to conduct an online survey of 115 HIPAA-covered entities such as health plans, healthcare clearinghouses, and healthcare providers. The questionnaire is designed to collect information on how the audits affect audited organizations, and to better understand how the audited entities view the auditing process.

There has been an array of misperceptions, misinformation, and misrepresentations concerning ICD-10-CM/PCS—making it hard to discern the true facts. Due to the increased concerns, bills have been introduced in Congress to postpone or entirely abandon the con-version to ICD-10.

Most of the controversy regarding ICD-10 has focused on the assertion that the code set will impose a major burden on physicians due to its level of detail and the number of codes. However, this assertion is not supported by the facts.